Everything's Eventual Page 15

  Fletcher turned around and began walking toward Heinz with Ramón’s gun held out. As he walked he realized that his right shoe was gone. He looked at Ramón, who was still lying facedown in a spreading pool of blood. Ramón still had hold of Fletcher’s loafer. He was like a dying weasel that refuses to let go of a chicken. Fletcher stopped long enough to put it on.

  Heinz turned as if to run, and Fletcher waggled the gun at him. The gun was empty but Heinz didn’t seem to know that. And maybe he remembered there was nowhere to run anyway, not here in the deathroom. He stopped moving and only stared at the oncoming gun and the oncoming man behind it. Heinz was crying. “One step back,” Fletcher said, and, still crying, Heinz took one step back.

  Fletcher stopped in front of Heinz’s machine. What was the word Heinz had used? Atavism, wasn’t it?

  The machine on the trolley looked much too simple for a man of Heinz’s intelligence—three dials, one switch marked ON and OFF (now in the OFF position), and a rheostat which had been turned so the white line on it pointed to roughly eleven o’clock. The needles on the dials all lay flat on their zeroes.

  Fletcher picked up the stylus and held it out to Heinz. Heinz made a wet sound, shook his head, and took another step backward. His face would lift and pull together in a kind of grief-struck sneer, then loosen again. His forehead was wet with sweat, his cheeks with tears. This second backward step took him almost beneath one of the caged lights, and his shadow puddled around his feet.

  “Take it or I’ll kill you,” Fletcher said. “And if you take another step backward I’ll kill you.” He had no time for this and it felt wrong in any case, but Fletcher could not stop himself. He kept seeing that picture of Tomás, the open eyes, the little scorched mark like a powder burn.

  Sobbing, Heinz took the blunt fountain-pen-shaped object, careful to hold it only by the rubber insulated sleeve.

  “Put it in your mouth,” Fletcher said. “Suck on it like it was a lollipop.”

  “No!” Heinz cried in a weepy voice. He shook his head and water flew off his face. His face was still going through its contortions: cramp and release, cramp and release. There was a green bubble of snot at the entrance to one of his nostrils; it expanded and contracted with Heinz’s rapid breathing but didn’t break. Fletcher had never seen anything quite like it. “No, you can’t make me!”

  But Heinz knew Fletcher could. The Bride of Frankenstein might not have believed it, and Escobar likely hadn’t had time to believe it, but Heinz knew he had no more right of refusal. He was in Tomás Herrera’s position, in Fletcher’s position. In one way that was revenge enough, but in another way it wasn’t. Knowing was an idea. Ideas were no good in here. In here seeing was believing.

  “Put it in your mouth or I’ll shoot you in the head,” Fletcher said, and shoved the empty gun at Heinz’s face. Heinz recoiled with a wail of terror. And now Fletcher heard his own voice drop, become confidential, become sincere. In a way it reminded him of Escobar’s voice. We are havin an area of low bressure, he thought. We are havin the steenkin rain-showers. “I’m not going to shock you if you just do it and hurry up. But I need you to know what it feels like.”

  Heinz stared at Fletcher. His eyes were blue and red-rimmed, swimming with tears. He didn’t believe Fletcher, of course, what Fletcher was saying made no sense, but Heinz very clearly wanted to believe it anyway, because, sense or nonsense, Fletcher was holding out the possibility of life. He just needed to be pushed a single step further.

  Fletcher smiled. “Do it for your research.”

  Heinz was convinced—not completely, but enough to believe Fletcher could be Mr. Maybe He Will after all. He put the steel rod into his mouth. His bulging eyes stared at Fletcher. Below them and above the jutting stylus—which looked not like a lollipop but an oldfashioned fever thermometer—that green bubble of snot swelled and retreated, swelled and retreated. Still pointing the gun at Heinz, Fletcher flicked the switch on the control panel from OFF to ON and gave the rheostat a hard turn. The white line on the knob went from eleven in the morning to five in the afternoon.

  Heinz might have had time to spit the stylus out, but shock caused him to clamp his lips down on the stainless steel barrel instead. The snapping sound was louder this time, like a small branch instead of a twig. Heinz’s lips pressed down even tighter. The green mucus bubble in his nostril popped. So did one of his eyes. Heinz’s entire body seemed to vibrate inside his clothes. His hands were bent at the wrists, the long fingers splayed. His cheeks went from white to pale gray to a darkish purple. Smoke began to pour out of his nose. His other eye popped out on his cheek. Above the dislocated eyes there were now two raw sockets that stared at Fletcher with surprise. One of Heinz’s cheeks either tore open or melted. A quantity of smoke and a strong odor of burned meat came out through the hole, and Fletcher observed small flames, orange and blue. Heinz’s mouth was on fire. His tongue was burning like a rug.

  Fletcher’s fingers were still on the rheostat. He turned it all the way back to the left, then flicked the switch to OFF. The needles, which had swung all the way to the +50 marks on their little dials, immediately fell dead again. The moment the electricity left him, Heinz crashed to the gray tile floor, trailing smoke from his mouth as he went. The stylus fell free, and Fletcher saw there were little pieces of Heinz’s lips on it. Fletcher’s gorge gave a salty, burping lurch, and he closed his throat against it. He didn’t have time to vomit over what he had done to Heinz; he might consider vomiting at a later time. Still, he lingered a moment longer, leaning over to look at Heinz’s smoking mouth and dislocated eyes. “How do you describe it?” he asked the corpse. “Now, while the experience is still fresh? What, nothing to say?”

  Fletcher turned and hurried across the room, detouring around Ramón, who was still alive and moaning. He sounded like a man having a bad dream.

  He remembered that the door was locked. Ramón had locked it; the key would be on the ring hanging at Ramón’s belt. Fletcher went back to the guard, knelt beside him, and tore the ring off his belt. When he did, Ramón groped out and seized Fletcher by the ankle again. Fletcher was still holding the gun. He rapped the butt down on the top of Ramón’s head. For a moment the hand on his ankle gripped even tighter, and then it let go.

  Fletcher started to get up and then thought, Bullets. He must have more. The gun’s empty. His next thought was that he didn’t need no steenkin bullets, Ramón’s gun had done all that it could for him. Shooting outside this room would bring the ordinaries like flies.

  Even so, Fletcher felt along Ramón’s belt, opening the little leather snap pouches until he found a speed-loader. He used it to fill up the gun. He didn’t know if he could actually bring himself to shoot ordinaries who were only men like Tomás, men with families to feed, but he could shoot officers and he could save at least one bullet for himself. He would very likely not be able to get out of the building—that would be like rolling a second 300 game in a row—but he would never be brought back to this room again, and set in the chair next to Heinz’s machine.

  He pushed the Bride of Frankenstein away from the door with his foot. Her eyes glared dully at the ceiling. Fletcher was coming more and more to understand that he had survived and these others had not. They were cooling off. On their skin, galaxies of bacteria had already begun to die. These were bad thoughts to be having in the basement of the Ministry of Information, bad thoughts to be in the head of a man who had become—perhaps only for a little while, more likely forever—a desaparecido. Still, he couldn’t help having them.

  The third key opened the door. Fletcher stuck his head out into the hall—cinderblock walls, green on the bottom half and a dirty cream-white on the top half, like the walls of an old school corridor. Faded red lino on the floor. No one was in the hall. About thirty feet down to the left, a small brown dog lay asleep against the wall. His feet were twitching. Fletcher didn’t know if the dog was dreaming about chasing or being chased, but he didn’t think he would be asleep at all if
the gunshots—or Heinz’s screaming—had been very loud out here. If I ever get back, he thought, I’ll write that soundproofing is the great triumph of dictatorship. I’ll tell the world. Of course I probably won’t get back, those stairs down to the right are probably as close to Forty-third Street as I’m ever going to get, but—

  But there was Mr. Maybe I Can.

  Fletcher stepped into the hall and pulled the door of the deathroom shut behind him. The little brown dog lifted its head, looked at Fletcher, puffed its lips out in a woof that was mostly a whisper, then lowered its head again and appeared to go back to sleep.

  Fletcher dropped to his knees, put his hands (one still holding Ramón’s gun) on the floor, bent, and kissed the lino. As he did it he thought of his sister—how she had looked going off to college eight years before her death by the river. She had been wearing a tartan skirt on the day she’d gone off to college, and the red in it hadn’t been the exact same red of the faded lino, but it was close. Close enough for government work, as they said.

  Fletcher got up. He started down the hall toward the stairs, the first-floor hallway, the street, the city, Highway 4, the patrols, the roadblocks, the border, the checkpoints, the water. The Chinese said a journey of a thousand miles started with a single step.

  I’ll see how far I get, Fletcher thought as he reached the foot of the stairs. I might just surprise myself. But he was already surprised, just to be alive. Smiling a little, holding Ramón’s gun out before him, Fletcher started up the stairs.

  A month later, a man walked up to Carlo Arcuzzi’s newsstand kiosk on Forty-third Street. Carlo had a nasty moment when he was almost sure the man meant to stick a gun in his face and rob him. It was only eight o’clock and still light, lots of people about, but did any of those things stop a man who was pazzo? And this man looked plenty pazzo—so thin his white shirt and gray pants seemed to float on him, and his eyes lay at the bottom of great round sockets. He looked like a man who had just been released from a concentration camp or (by some huge mistake) a loony bin. When his hand went into his pants pocket, Carlo Arcuzzi thought, Now comes the gun.

  But instead of a gun came a battered old Lord Buxton, and from the wallet came a ten-dollar bill. Then, in a perfectly sane tone of voice, the man in the white shirt and gray pants asked for a pack of Marlboros. Carlo got them, put a package of matches on top of them, and pushed them across the counter of his kiosk. While the man opened the Marlboros, Carlo made change.

  “No,” the man said when he saw the change. He had put one of the cigarettes in his mouth.

  “No? What you mean no?”

  “I mean keep the change,” the man said. He offered the pack to Carlo. “Do you smoke? Have one of these, if you like.”

  Carlo looked mistrustfully at the man in the white shirt and gray pants. “I don’t smoke. It’s a bad habit.”

  “Very bad,” the man agreed, then lit his cigarette and inhaled with apparent pleasure. He stood smoking and watching the people on the other side of the street. There were girls on the other side of the street. Men would look at girls in their summer clothes, that was human nature. Carlo didn’t think this customer was crazy anymore, although he had left the change of a ten-dollar bill sitting on the narrow counter of the kiosk.

  The thin man smoked the cigarette all the way down to the filter. He turned toward Carlo, staggering a little, as if he was not used to smoking and the cigarette had made him dizzy.

  “A nice night,” the man said.

  Carlo nodded. It was. It was a nice night. “We’re lucky to be alive,” Carlo said.

  The man nodded. “All of us. All of the time.”

  He walked to the curb, where there was a litter basket. He dropped the pack of cigarettes, full save one, into the litter basket. “All of us,” he said. “All of the time.” He walked away. Carlo watched him go and thought that maybe he was pazzo after all. Or maybe not. Crazy was a hard state to define.

  ——

  This is a slightly Kafka-esque story about an interrogation room in the South American version of Hell. In such stories, the fellow being interrogated usually ends up spilling everything and then being killed (or losing his mind). I wanted to write one with a happier ending, however unreal that might be. And here it is.

  The Little Sisters

  of Eluria

  If there’s a magnum opus in my life, it’s probably the yet unfinished seven-volume series about Roland Deschain of Gilead and his search for the Dark Tower which serves as the hub of existence. In 1996 or 1997, Ralph Vicinanza (my sometime agent and foreign rights man of business) asked me if I’d like to contribute a story about Roland’s younger years for a whopper fantasy anthology Robert Silverberg was putting together. I tentatively agreed. Nothing came, though, and nothing came. I was about to give up when I woke one morning thinking about The Talisman, and the great pavilion where Jack Sawyer first glimpses the Queen of the Territories. In the shower (where I invariably do my best imagining—I think it’s a womb thing), I started to visualize that tent in ruins … but still filled with whispering women. Ghosts. Maybe vampires. Little Sisters. Nurses of death instead of life. Composing a story from that central image was amazingly difficult. I had lots of space to move around in—Silverberg wanted short novels, not short stories—but it was still hard. These days, everything about Roland and his friends wants to be not just long but sort of epic. One thing this story has going for it is that you don’t need to have read the Dark Tower novels to enjoy it. And by the way, for you Tower junkies, DT 5 is now finished, all nine hundred pages of it. It’s called Wolves of the Calla.

  ——

  [Author’s Note: The Dark Tower books begin with Roland of Gilead, the last gunslinger in an exhausted world that has “moved on,” pursuing a magician in a black robe. Roland has been chasing Walter for a very long time. In the first book of the cycle, he finally catches up. This story, however, takes place while Roland is still casting about for Walter’s trail. S. K.]

  I. FULL EARTH. THE EMPTY TOWN. THE BELLS.

  THE DEAD BOY. THE OVERTURNED WAGON.

  THE GREEN FOLK.

  On a day in Full Earth so hot that it seemed to suck the breath from his chest before his body could use it, Roland of Gilead came to the gates of a village in the Desatoya Mountains. He was travelling alone by then, and would soon be travelling afoot, as well. This whole last week he had been hoping for a horse doctor, but guessed such a fellow would do him no good now, even if this town had one. His mount, a two-year-old roan, was pretty well done for.

  The town gates, still decorated with flowers from some festival or other, stood open and welcoming, but the silence beyond them was all wrong. The gunslinger heard no clip-clop of horses, no rumble of wagon wheels, no merchants’ huckstering cries from the marketplace. The only sounds were the low hum of crickets (some sort of bug, at any rate; they were a bit more tuneful than crickets, at that), a queer wooden knocking sound, and the faint, dreamy tinkle of small bells.

  Also, the flowers twined through the wrought-iron staves of the ornamental gate were long dead.

  Between his knees, Topsy gave two great, hollow sneezes—K’chow! K’chow!—and staggered sideways. Roland dismounted, partly out of respect for the horse, partly out of respect for himself—he didn’t want to break a leg under Topsy if Topsy chose this moment to give up and canter into the clearing at the end of his path.

  The gunslinger stood in his dusty boots and faded jeans under the beating sun, stroking the roan’s matted neck, pausing every now and then to yank his fingers through the tangles of Topsy’s mane, and stopping once to shoo off the tiny flies clustering at the corners of Topsy’s eyes. Let them lay their eggs and hatch their maggots there after Topsy was dead, but not before.

  Roland thus honored his horse as best he could, listening to those distant, dreamy bells and the strange wooden tocking sound as he did. After awhile he ceased his absent grooming and looked thoughtfully at the open gate.

  The cross above its ce
nter was a bit unusual, but otherwise the gate was a typical example of its type, a western commonplace which was not useful but traditional—all the little towns he had come to in the last tenmonth seemed to have one such where you came in (grand) and one more such where you went out (not so grand). None had been built to exclude visitors, certainly not this one. It stood between two walls of pink adobe that ran into the scree for a distance of about twenty feet on either side of the road and then simply stopped. Close the gate, lock it with many locks, and all that meant was a short walk around one bit of adobe wall or the other.

  Beyond the gate, Roland could see what looked in most respects like a perfectly ordinary High Street—an inn, two saloons (one of which was called The Bustling Pig; the sign over the other was too faded to read), a mercantile, a smithy, a Gathering Hall. There was also a small but rather lovely wooden building with a modest bell tower on top, a sturdy fieldstone foundation on the bottom, and a gold-painted cross on its double doors. The cross, like the one over the gate, marked this as a worshipping place for those who held to the Jesus Man. This wasn’t a common religion in MidWorld, but far from unknown; that same thing could have been said about most forms of worship in those days, including the worship of Baal, Asmodeus, and a hundred others. Faith, like everything else in the world these days, had moved on. As far as Roland was concerned, God o’ the Cross was just another religion which taught that love and murder were inextricably bound together—that in the end, God always drank blood.

  Meanwhile, there was the singing hum of insects that sounded almost like crickets. The dreamlike tinkle of the bells. And that queer wooden thumping, like a fist on a door. Or on a coffintop.

  Something here’s a long way from right, the gunslinger thought. ‘Ware, Roland; this place has a reddish odor.